Call for Papers - Africa of the past, Africa of the future: The dynamics of global conflicts, peace and development
This year the conference will be organized jointly by SOAS and the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, with a two-day conference in London and a two day’s symposium in Prague. The lecture series and the conference will share the same theme: “Africa of the past, Africa of the future”. The London conference will explore the “The dynamics of time in Africanist scholarship and art” while the Prague conference will focus on “The dynamics of global conflicts, peace and development”.
Asixoxe – Let’s Talk! SOAS Conference on African Philosophy
2th-3th May, Centre of Global Studies, Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
5th -6th May, Russell Square Campus, SOAS, University of London
Africa is often portrayed as a continent without a future, a continent of innocent ignorance about time, a place of a blissful, animal-like existence in the present. Such is the basis of Hegel’s dismissal of the continent as an actor in the world’s history: “Africa . . . is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature” (Hegel 117). Hegel’s reading of Africa was very influential in Europe’s intellectual and political history, feeding directly into justifications of the colonial enterprise. Alternatively, Africa is depicted as a continent of the past, of perennial traditions that determine the present—and compromise the future. Such visions constitute a vein that goes through much Africanist discourse: from cultural theory, built upon issues of identity and cultural essentialism, via politics, which oftentimes strives to resurrect a putative precolonial past, to philosophy.
African philosophers such as John S. Mbiti have, notoriously, denied Africans the very capacity to conceive of a “distant future” (23) and found evidence of this in a range of African practices, down to the alleged grammatical incapacity of African languages to express the remote future. While Mbiti’s arguments can easily be refuted, the point he made about Africans’ lack of imagining the future is a complex one and it has been reasserted by other scholars. Johanna Offe confirms a glaring absence in Africa of the “modern” concept of a “contingent, and yet controllable future” (56). This concept underlies the notion of development understood as the readiness to alter one’s current practices to change a future situation; for that, the future situation must be imagined first—and it must be seen as determinable by human agency.
If, as Offe suggests in line with Pierre Bourdieu, in Africa the future is conceptualized as an inescapable “unfolding” (Offe 62) of events that are taking place in the present, following on from the present as its logical consequence, and it is “not contingent and open” (63) with “various [possible] outcomes” (62), but rather “expected and certain” (63), then of course the continent is locked in an eternal cyclical return of the same. The future only regurgitates the past and it is meaningless to make it the object of imagination because it is simply an extension of the present and past situation.
In a sharp contrast with this past-oriented outlook, more and more African thinkers and Africanists develop new thinking with regard to Africa’s futures. In counterbalance to the portrayal of Africa as “the zone of the absolute dystopia” in the media and in social sciences, where “African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization” (Eshun 291-292), they approach to African futures through narratives such as cosmopolitanism, Afropolitanism, Afro-futurism and techno-science fictions.
Our project strives to analyzing the relevance of those new approaches as well as to outlining their interdisciplinarity as they deal with African global future. Can African sci-fi and Afrofuturism, for example, inspire a more future-oriented outlook in African philosophy, political sciences, anthropology, theology, sociology, economy, and vice versa? What effects would such an orientation have in these disciplines? How far do thinkers from these different areas of studies perceive African futures, particularly on account of current global conflicts, peace processes and the aspiration for development that shake this continent ?
We invite papers for the conference, while topics that speak to the outlined focus are preferred, we also welcome papers on other topics related to African philosophy and social sciences. Please confirm your participation and submit the titles of your papers by 1st April 2017 to the below mentioned email addresses. All queries should also be sent to related email address. Each speaker will be given 20 minutes for the presentation, with subsequent 10 minutes for questions and discussion. We envisage a subsequent publication of selected papers from the conference. There is no registration fee for presenters and other participants, but a previous registration is desirable.
Alena Rettová (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Michelle Clarke (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa
SOAS, University of London
WC1H 0XG London
Albert Kasanda (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Centre of Global Studies
Institute of Philosophy
Czech Academy of Sciences
Jilská 1, 110 00 Prague 1
Czech Republic
News
Conference Africa Knows!
Due to pandemic COVID-19, the conference Africa Knows! takes place in form of online meetings. Starting from 2nd December Africanists from around the world will deal mainly with the topic of decolonization.
Members of CAAS will also attend the conference mainly on the panel that is initiated by CAAS and which deals with the topic of African Studies in Central and Eastern Europe.
For more information see https://www.africaknows.eu/
read more >>Africa Week 2020
Festival "Africa Week" which follows last year "Africa Day" will take place from 12th to 18th September in Campus Hybernská, Prague. During the whole week, you can visit diverse lectures and workshops on different topics like culture, politics or history. The programme could be found here (in Czech): https://www.facebook.com/events/295147738393462.
read more >>Asixoxe Conference (Let's Talk) On African Philosophy
Annual conference "Asixoxe Conference (Let's Talk) On African Philosophy" will take place on 15th – 16th June 2020. This time on Zoom. In case you would like to join, please, contact Dr. Albert Kasanda at: kasanda[at]flu.cas.cz.
For the complete programme click here.
read more >>Recruitment of Head of Research at the Nordic Africa Institute
The Nordic Africa Institute calls for application for the position of Head of Research. In case of interest send your application to e-mail: nai-applications@nai.uu.se. Deadline is 10 February 2020.
For more information see the call for application.
read more >>Viva Africa 2019
Palacký University Olomouc, University of Hradec Kálové, Metropolitan University Prague in co-operation with Czech Association for African Studies invites to international conference Viva Africa 2019.
The topic of this year conference is "Multiple Entanglements in African Politics." The conference will take place at Palacký University Olomouc, Art Centre, Corpus Christi Chapel, Univerzitní 3, Olomouc, the Czech Republic during 28-29 November 2019.
The keynote lecture will be given by Prof. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, LASDEL).
The programme of the conference could be found here.
For more information on keynote lecture please see the abstract.
More on practical information could be found here.
read more >>Conference and presentation on migration
We would like to invite to two events on the topic of migration in Prague.
The first event is a presentation by Zuzana Uhde on Transnational migration in Africa: Uganda in global geopolitical context at the Institute of Sociology on Thursday 17 Octobre at 4 pm. The presentation is in Czech.
For further information visit the link.
The second event is the conference organized by Zuzana Uhde, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Petra Ezzeddine, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University as part of the Research Programme "Global Conflict and Local Interactions" of the Strategy AV21.
The conference aims to discuss how the changing political economy of migration interacts with emerging global governance for migration. It will take place on Friday 25 October 2019 at Academic conference centre, Husova 4a, Prague 1.
For more information and registration follow this link.
read more >>
AEGIS - Summer school
Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies invites to Summer School that will take place in Cagliary, 9-13 June 2020.
The 2020 Summer School will address the theme of African Futures: Promises, Projections and Reflections on a Continent in Transition. The 2020 Summer School is organized by the Centro di Studi Africani in Sardegna – CSAS in collaboration with the AEGIS Centres of Leipzig, Roskilde, Leiden, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Köln, Leuven, Napoli, Bayreuth, Basel.
The workshop is open to some 20 PhD students and young researchers coming from AEGIS Centres and their affiliates in Europe and Africa.
For more information see the call for application.
The application form could be found here.
read more >>Africa and the Academy in the 21st Century (Basel, 1-2 November 2019)
The Centre for African Studies Basel and the Swiss Society for African Studies invite to join the Conference Africa and the Academy in the 21st Century.
The keynote address (Carl Schlettwein Lecture) will be presented by Prof Francis Nyamnjoh (UCT).
The conference invites the speakers and audience to reflect on a classical work in the field of African Studies, Africa and the Disciplines (V. Mudimbe, R. Bates and J. O'Barr 1993), but also consider the present and future of African Studies, in particular in Switzerland.
For more information see conference poster or program.
read more >>Basel Summer School in African Studies
The Centre for African Studies Basel (ZASB) calls for applications for the 4th Basel Summer School in African Studies (9-13 September 2019):
The Value(s) of Science. The normative order of African Studies
The Basel Summer School in African Studies 2019 addresses the issue of the normative order in African Studies. Science is a highly normative enterprise in that its ultimate goal, producing knowledge to render the world intelligible, constitutes a broad commitment to some notion of a better world. Part of the challenge of doing African Studies, therefore, should be a commitment to uncovering the values underlying science not to dispose of them, but to harness them to even better research. The title of the Summer School is cast purposefully in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, it speaks to the fundamental value of science and, on the other hand, to how interests come together to lend legitimacy and purpose to science. The basic goal of the Summer School is to address this ambivalence by inviting proposals which look into "the value(s) of science" from several angles:
· Which values underlie development research and how do they affect methodological choices?
· How do ethical commitments shape how researchers frame their research?
· Is there a politics of Western epistemology and, if so, what would be a scientific Asian Studies' approach to problematize it?
· What is the precise methodological argument behind decolonial calls for delinking?
· How do the values of science inform its value?
· What role is played by ideological commitments in the validation of knowledge?
· How do ideas of a better life or world inform research projects?
Advanced Study Skills workshop: Composing Attractive Abstracts
The half-day Advanced Study Skills workshop offers guidance on the content, structure and language conventions of conference and research article abstracts in the social sciences and humanities. At the end of the workshop, participants are expected to have gained independence inwriting ready-to-submit abstracts for conferences or journals.
Application
Participants will be selected on the strength and merits of a two-page application in which they choose one of the key questions listed above and explain how their research relates to it. In addition, applications should include a CV of the applicant.
Practical information
The summer school is open for PhD students enrolled in Switzerland and abroad. The fee for participation is CHF 100. It includes snacks and lunch on the five course days. Transportation and accommodation is not included. Participants will thus need to source adequate funding from their home institution if necessary.
The deadline for application is 5 August 2019.
Official call is available here.
read more >>Asixoxe and lecture of Dr Irina Turner
Conference Asixoxe - Let´s Talk! will take place again in Prague on 17 and 18 June. The conference is organized by Centre of Global Studies, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences and School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. For more information see Facebook.
Day after the conference, Dr Irina Turner will hold lecture Does Facebook eats up Airwaves. The lecture will take place in Kampus Hybernska at 3:30 PM. For more information see Facebook.
read more >>Day of Africa again in Prague
The event called Day of Africa will take place in Prague once again. During the event, that is co-organized by Faculty of Arts, Charles University and Faculty of Tropical AgriScience, The Czech University of Life Science in Prague, the visitors could visit several lectures, workshops or cultural events.
More information could be found here or on Facebook pages.
Call for papers: Viva Africa 2019
Palacký University Olomouc in cooperation with University of Hradec Králové and Metropolitan University Prague under the auspices of The Czech Association of African Studies is announcing Viva Africa 2019 call for papers.
Theme: Multiple entanglements in African politics
The conference will take place on 28-29 November 2019, Palacký University Olomouc.
Please, send your abstract of max. 300 words before 30 June 2019 to viva.africa.conference@gmail.com
The complete call for papers could be seen here.
Call for papers: China in Africa and Africa in China
Ghent Africa Platform announced a call for papers for conference China in Africa and Africa in China. The conference on relations between Africa and China will take place in Ghent,12-13 December 2019. For more information, you can look at call for papers or Ghent University webpages.
read more >>International Conference 'Africa as a Partner'
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and the embassies of African countries to the Czech Republic organize an international conference 'Africa as a Partner' which is going to take place on the Africa Day 25 May 2017. Do not miss the events preceeding the conference on Saturday 20 and Wednesday 24 May. For more info (in Czech language) see here. For programme (in Czech language) see here.
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